Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
Last year, Google started exploring the idea of using patterns in search queries to model things happening in the real world. Disease outbreaks seemed like a useful starting point, and the team determined that in the US, certain flu-related queries had a strong correlation with the actual numbers of cases recorded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
That would be an interesting though not particularly useful observation if not for one thing. The Google-generated estimates of the number of flu cases are available one to two weeks ahead of the official figures.
If the correlation holds, it could give public health authorities additional time to respond to a major outbreak. The sooner action is taken, the more chance there is of restricting the spread of the disease.
This project was possible because Google was able to analyse "hundreds of billions" of searches over the last five years, and reflect the data mining research interests of Google founders Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page.
From an individual's point of view, Google Flu Trends has little more than curiosity value. By the time it shows flu activity is picking up in a particular state, it might be too late to benefit much from vaccination. So if you do see vaccination as a sensible move, why delay it to a time when stocks may already be running short?
But at least you'd still be ahead of people that waited for the official figures as a prompt to go for a jab.
The development is likely to bring fresh attention to Google's "Don't be evil" mantra. Being able to estimate the number of flu cases is unlikely to do any harm, but what if a similar sort of analysis yielded results that could be exploited to the detriment of others?
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
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Business Discovery takes its cues from consumer apps. Like Google, it encourages us- ers to hunt for and explore data without worrying about or even noticing the underly- ing technology. Their entire experience is working within an intuitive interface to get real-time, self-service results with only minimal training. ...more
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